Hurricane Katrina mess in Orleans Parish courthouse evidence area is still being cleaned up

The plastic bag sat there in the basement of the Orleans Parish criminal courthouse, coated in a moldy film that hides what's inside and where it might belong. They'll get around to opening it, joked Robbie Keen, "whenever we get brave enough."

The rank contents have stayed packed in plastic since the initial cleanup following Hurricane Katrina, when floodwaters filled the criminal courthouse basement and turned an already-primitive evidence storage operation into a cesspool of waterlogged evidence.

In some cases, prosecutors in criminal cases have simply gone without, assuming the evidence was lost or destroyed.

But over nearly two years, Keen and her team of five full-time workers have steadily waded through 18,000 pieces of evidence. They have sorted, repackaged, shelved and bar-coded them in a laborious bid to bring modern, computerized sense to the evidence -- and possibly exonerate innocent convicts, or underscore their guilt, in the process.

Under a $1.4 million grant from the National Institute of Justice, the Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project has cataloged key items in rape, murder and armed robbery cases from before the storm -- stuff that by state law must be retained forever.

Some of the evidence they've sorted dates back to 1958, said Keen, an archaeologist working for the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation.

"This is like the biggest dig," said Keen. "We had teeth yesterday, dentures ... The blood and stuff, it's amazing how long it lasts. We found blood into the '70s and it was still liquid."

The work is not done. Hundreds of orphaned pieces of evidence wait to be opened and pegged to criminal cases, remaining for now in a steamy warehouse whose location is kept secret.

But the evidence rooms at the criminal courthouse at Tulane and Broad Streets -- in the basement and the attic -- now are clean, tidy and relatively free of the vermin that would feast off confiscated drugs, Keen said.

Several boxes of marijuana and other narcotics will be sent to a steel plant in an undisclosed location -- a purging process that is also a key part of the project.

At least 25 percent of the evidence in various rooms of the criminal courthouse has been tossed, along with 75 percent of the evidence at the warehouse, Keen said.

Some items -- tires, fishing rods, not drugs -- can go on the market. Clerk of Criminal Court Arthur Morrell said he plans to sell some of the old evidence, possibly through an online auction.

"We got so much stuff. We're going to have to. It would be criminal to destroy some stuff and not bring money to our office," Morrell said during a recent tour of the evidence rooms with Criminal District Judge Laurie White, who oversees the grant.

The conditions now a far cry from what they were when the cleanup first started in early 2010, Keen said.

"We had an extreme rodent problem. The rats would eat the pot and use the roaches for water," Keen said, describing the mess. "We had dead bodies of rats hanging out of things."

The project has modest aims: To bring evidence storage in Orleans Parish into the modern era, aided by a computerized inventory system known as "The Beast," which replaced a paper-and-Magic Marker system that endured for decades.

Before the scanning system, if courthouse staffers misplaced a piece of evidence on a shelf, there would be no ready way to track it down. Now, The Beast knows where it sits.

"So far, since Katrina, we haven't lost any cases," insisted Donna Thompson, assistant supervisor in the basement property room where court staff tracks the evidence and signs it out to prosecutors.

"In the future, if a case gets retried, there's going to be no question in their minds when they ask for the evidence," said Emily Maw, director of the Innocence Project New Orleans, a participant in the project.

"They're going to know the answer they get is absolutely accurate."

One recent criminal case highlighted the problem. In an aggravated rape trial, prosecutors in 2006 thought that a fetus that was central to the case was lost in the Katrina floodwaters. The jury hung.

Then, last year, the fetus was discovered on the day of trial with a jury picked, having apparently been overlooked. The judge ordered a mistrial. Finally, this month, prosecutors used the fetus to help convict 58-year-old Samuel Williams.

Now, behind a locked chain in a room where defendants once came in for lineups, boxes line up neatly on shelves, with bar-coded stickers. Fingerprints, crime scene photos and rape-kit evidence rest inside. On another shelf, neatly stacked plastic tubes hold knives of various shapes and sizes -- weapons once, now evidence.

Representatives of the Innocence Project, the DA's office and the Police and Justice Foundation meet every other week to go over cases where rediscovered biological evidence might prove fruitful to either confirm a conviction or open the door to an exoneration.

So far, evidence has gone to the lab for testing in nine cases. Four remain pending. Three test results supported the convictions. Two were inconclusive.

Regardless, it's a step forward, Maw said,

Since a 2001 state law granted state funding for indigent convicts to seek post-conviction DNA testing in some cases, just three Orleans Parish prisoners had sought the testing until the project got underway. Now a dozen have.

One main reason: No one quite knew where biological evidence sat.

"We said we'd love to do post-conviction DNA testing in Orleans Parish, but we can't because we're never going to find the evidence," said Maw. "It didn't necessarily mean it wasn't there. The system had been so chaotic for so many years."